Olivia Guest, Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, Netherlands, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 21 October, 15:00-16:00).

On logical inference over brains, behavior, and artificial neural networks

In the cognitive, computational, and neuro- sciences, we often reason about what models (viz., formal and/or computational) represent, learn, or “know”, as well as what algorithm they instantiate. The putative goal of such reasoning is to generalize claims about the model in question to claims about the mind and brain. This reasoning process typically presents as inference about the representations, processes, or algorithms the human mind and brain instantiate. Such inference is often based on a model’s performance on a task, and whether that performance approximates human behavior or brain activity. The model in question is often an artificial neural network (ANN) model, though the problems we discuss are generalizable to all reasoning over models. Arguments typically take the form “the brain does what the ANN does because the ANN reproduced the pattern seen in brain activity” or “cognition works this way because the ANN learned to approximate task performance.” Then, the argument concludes that models achieve this outcome by doing what people do or having the capacities people have. At first blush, this might appear as a form of modus ponens, a valid deductive logical inference rule. However, as we explain in this article, this is not the case, and thus, this form of argument eventually results in affirming the consequent—a logical or inferential fallacy. We discuss what this means broadly for research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology; what it means for models when they lose the ability to mediate between theory and data in a meaningful way; and what this means for the logic, the metatheoretical calculus, our fields deploy in high-level scientific inference.